Monday, 19 May 2014

In recent months
several TW:eed Project scientists have been out and about doing some fieldwork.
Here is a short summary:

March

Janet
Sherwin, Tim Smithson and Kelly Richardson visited Coquetdale, in
Northumberland to continue their sedimentological and palaeontological
investigations. It was a rather wet visit overall, with rising river levels
meaning some underwater rock sampling at times. But they did find some
fantastic fossils and sediments, including a bed with well-preserved abundant
plant fossils.

A fossil-plant bed at
Coquetdale

April

Jenny and Rob
Clack went to the Ayr, on the west coast of Scotland to examine the Ballagan
Formation at this location. At this location the strata dips at a low angle on
the foreshore, quite different to on the east coast, although the main
sedimentary character of the formation is similar. The fossils were hard to
find at this site, but that didn’t stop them finding a tetrapod maxilla (upper
jaw bone) – wow!

The sequence at Ayr, with the Heads of
Ayr in the background

May

Jenny Clack,
Rob Clack and Tim Smithson visited Nova Scotia to work with Jason Anderson from
the University of Calgary and local expert Chris Mansky. They examined material
from the early Carboniferous in the Blue Beach Fossil Museum, and along the Blue
Beach coastal exposure. Their visit made local news headlines in the Herald News and CTV News Atlanticand highlighted the importance of
the site. They examined material from lungfish,
rhizodonts, actinopterygians and tetrapods. Go to our TW:eed Project Facebook page to
find out more about the visit.

The Blue Beach field exposure

The team will
be back in the field together in the Scottish Borders in late June.